About this weblog

Here we'll explore the nexus of legal rulings, Capitol Hill
policy-making, technical standards development, and technological
innovation that creates -- and will recreate -- the networked world as we
know it. Among the topics we'll touch on: intellectual property
conflicts, technical architecture and innovation, the evolution of
copyright, private vs. public interests in Net policy-making, lobbying
and the law, and more.

Disclaimer: the opinions expressed in this weblog are those of the authors and not of their respective institutions.

I've been going on about e-book evils a good bit lately, but they do have undeniable appeal. As someone remarked to me privately, you can torrent down today more e-books than you could read in the remainder of your lifetime, no matter how old you are, and carry them around on a piece of hardware smaller than your thumb. Try doing that with physical books. Touche'.

Joel Johnson, it seems, would like at least for vendors of goods like e-books (that you don't actually own) to be required to tell you that you're not actually "buying" the thing when you click that button that says "buy." That seems a thin solace for the mess we're currently in, but at least one can hope that giving it some more attention will lead to more ideas. Maybe, as Gizmodo suggests in the image it put with Johnson's story, every iPad and Kindle should come with a big "OPP" label.